Samuel Butler

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

The world will only, in the end, follow those who have despised as well as served it.

I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.

Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.

The money men make lives after them.

In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.

A man who is good enough to go to heaven is not good enough to be a clergyman.

If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?

Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?

Cultivating a close, warmhearted feeling for others is the ultimate source of success in life.

You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.

Remembering a wrong is like carrying a burden on the mind.

God has no religion.

If there is any moral in Christianity, if there is anything to be learned from it, if the whole story is not profitless from first to last, it comes to this: that a man should back his own opinion against the world s.

Mind your thoughts, as they become your words. Mind your words, as they become your actions. Mind your actions, as they become you.

In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.

Those who are free of resentful thoughts surely find peace.

All beings are by nature Buddha, as ice by nature is water. Apart from water there is no ice; apart from beings, no Buddha.

The Bible does not need advertising by me, but I wish more people could be persuaded to read it. Perhaps if they had been, we should not have this war on our hands. For greed and idleness brought it on.

In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.